A light breeze followed the Depression-era workers down a steep narrow path in Griffith Park to confront a brush fire with only wet sacks and shovels.

Then the wind shifted, hurling a sheet of flame up the ravine. At least 29 failed to scramble up the canyon wall. You could tell the fire's progress by the screams, witnesses said.

"The flames would catch a man and his screams would make an awful pitch. Then there would be an awful silence," John Secor, a survivor of the Oct. 3, 1933 wildfire, told a coroner's inquest. "Then you would hear somebody scream. And then it would be silent again.

"It was all over inside seven minutes."

As the nation this week mourns 19 firefighters who lost their lives last weekend fighting an Arizona wildfire, historians note that the last time that many died in a single blaze was the Griffith Park fire 80 years ago this fall. It was the second deadliest wildfire ever for U.S. firefighters, with Arizona now ranking third.

"It was a tragedy of tragedies," said Los Angeles City Councilman Tom LaBonge, who once presided over the planting of 29 trees in their memory. "The city mourned for the loss of lives. I'm so sad about the tragedy (in Arizona)."

It was 1933, the middle of the Great Depression. Millions of Americans were out of work. A New Deal was struck by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to hire them.

And Los Angeles County, which administered the federal welfare relief, put nearly 3,800 jobless men to work for 40 cents an hour clearing roads and bridle trails in Griffith Park.

The mercury had hit 100 degrees on Oct. 3 when some workers bent an ear toward a small radio broadcasting the World Series in New York.

Shortly after 2 p.m., a small fire broke out near Harding Golf Course, historians say. A man in a dark suit was seen running away.

The welfare relief workers -- laborers, clerks and even executives who'd ended up on the dole -- were not trained to fight fires. Los Angeles park officials later said thousands would volunteer to fight the growing blaze in Mineral Wells Canyon. Many workers later testified they were ordered to fight the fire or lose their jobs.

Some balked. The rest gathered their shovels and wet sacks on the ridge above, then hiked single file down the twisting trail without any water in which to fight the fire. "It was just a lark to us," said one survivor, according to a narrative compiled by historian Mike Eberts. "It didn't look dangerous then. We laughed about it and started down, to bat the fire out in a hurry."

Instead, they were met by a Santa Ana wind gust -- and a hissing wall of uphill flame. The workers tried scrambling back up the canyon -- only to be met by a tide of approaching workers, historians say. Some fell, clinging to the brush, only to be trampled. Others fled into the surrounding thicket.

"The Griffith Park fire was screwed up from beginning to end," said Eberts, a professor at Glendale Community College who has written a detailed history on the park. "The large number of relief workers were coerced or volunteered.

"They didn't have firefighting training. They had shovels and wet sacks -- and in some way, they were going to bludgeon the fire to death."

The Los Angeles Fire Department would eventually limit the blaze to 47 acres.

And when the blackened Griffith Park finally cooled, it was difficult to count the dead let alone identify them. Welfare workers searched for lost friends. Wives and families looked for errant loved ones. The hundreds of transient relief workers were hard to place.

Early estimates tallied as many as 80 killed, but the District Attorney's Office put the official toll at 29 dead. As many as 150 of the laborer-firefighters were injured.

Only the Devil's Broom wildfire in Silverton, Idaho, that killed 86 firefighters in 1910, has been deadlier to brush land firefighters.

"It's the biggest fire death we've had in Los Angeles. It was a tragedy," said Louis Alvarado, longtime honorary mayor of Griffith Park, who noted local rangers patrol its hills, now piped with water, in a pumper truck on the hottest days. "I don't think it could ever happen again."